Alabama teachers and public school staff are retiring at the highest level in nearly a decade.

That’s according to recent 2020-21 numbers provided by Alabama’s Teacher Retirement System. The school year saw 3,515 employees retire, the most since the 2010-11 school year, when just under 4,100 employees retired after changes to Alabama retirement benefits.

Those numbers likely are due to pandemic stresses, according to Roanoke City Schools Superintendent Chuck Marcum. His district had eight employees retire — which may not seem like a lot, but that’s nearly 5% of the district’s work force, twice as many as might retire in a given year.

“This past year has been such a challenge for teachers,” Marcum said. “I just think that some of the ones who had an opportunity to, this was probably the final straw.”

Of the eight employees who retired, five were teachers, he said. And those positions are getting harder and harder to fill, particularly in a rural area like Roanoke, a city of 6,100 people in east Alabama.

“It was already a problem,” Marcum said of teacher workforce issues, “and now it’s on steroids because of COVID.”

“Eighteen years ago,” he said, “we would have had 30 applicants for an open elementary position. This year, we had five.”

Marcum chaired the state’s teacher shortage task force in 2019, which examined how a national teacher shortage was impacting Alabama’s schools and what could be done to reverse the trend.

“When we were doing that work as a group, we thought we realized what was coming, but we really had no idea what was coming because we’d never heard of COVID,” he said

State lawmakers have made some changes they hope will improve shortages in some subject areas, Marcum said, like upping salaries for middle and high school math and science teachers.

“But we’ve got to get the word out that there’s also a teacher shortage in history, English, and even elementary,” he added.

In all, more than half of Alabama school districts saw more than or close to the highest number of retirements in the past decade.

Baldwin County saw 132 employees retire, the highest number in recent years, but Superintendent Eddie Tyler told AL.com he isn’t worried.

“That the numbers were only slightly above our average pre-pandemic should speak to how safe our staff felt coming back to school this year and how dedicated they are to teaching our students,” Tyler wrote in an email to AL.com. Baldwin County offered in-person learning for most of 2020-21, though some teachers taught classes virtually.

Baldwin County — the fastest-growing school district in the state — still attracts a large number of applicants, Tyler said. “It is not uncommon for us to see 100 plus applicants for a single certified position.”

In Trussville City Schools, which saw nearly twice the number of employees retire at the end of this school year in comparison to last year, Superintendent Pattie Neill, in an emailed response to AL.com, said retirement is a personal decision and that “some years yield a higher number of retirees than other years.”

Homewood City Schools saw 27 employees retire, nearly 5% of its workforce and the largest number of retirees in more than a decade, but have been able to fill the open positions, according to spokesperson Merrick Wilson.

Statewide, it’s unclear how many teaching jobs are open, but there are more than 2,700 certified teaching jobs listed on the state department of education job board. Some mention “potential” job openings, while others list multiple openings in a single listing.

Roanoke’s Marcum said in districts and regions where few candidates apply for open positions, schools will have to rely more and more emergency-certified teachers.

“You’re going to see more and more people out-of-field,” he said. “The colleges are doing a good job with the quality of the graduate, there’s just not enough of them.”

According to data from the 2019-20 school year, more than 100 school districts have at least one teacher certified on an emergency basis. In four districts — Midfield City, Barbour County, Dallas County and Lowndes County — more than 10% of all teachers were certified on an emergency basis.

Roanoke’s Marcum said in districts and regions where few candidates apply for open positions, schools will have to rely more and more emergency-certified teachers.

“You’re going to see more and more people out-of-field,” he said. “The colleges are doing a good job with the quality of the graduate, there’s just not enough of them.”

Montgomery County had 90 teachers on emergency certification, amounting to more than 5% of the teacher workforce there. The district saw 143 employees retire this year, the highest number since the 2010-11 school year.

Marcum said in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, he hopes lawmakers will continue to take a serious look at how to make the teaching profession more attractive.

“There’s no doubt that [recruiting and retaining teachers] is a tremendous challenge, and it’s exponentially more difficult now.”